Customer Reviews

Ten Years to Doomsday

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Originally published in 1964, this 1977 Jove paperback re-issue has an eye-catching cover illustration by Robert Adragna.

The human society colonizing the planet Lyff has quietly been going about its business without much in the way of excitement. Seemingly locked into a medieval state of development, the Lyffans don't realize that their planet is in fact first in the path of an oncoming alien invasion, an invasion lurking only a decade into the future. The aliens - referred to as the Migrants - show no mercy to anything or anyone in their path.

Three Terran operatives are sent on a covert mission to Lyff. Their mission: carry out the almost hopeless task of accelerating the development of the planet's civilization to a point where the Lyffans can assist in the space-based defense of their home world. They have ten years to go from crossbows to starships.

With cynical detachment, John Harlen, Pindar Smith, and Ansgar Sorenstein arrive on Lyff and strategize for ways to prod their unwitting hosts into the space age. In short order they learn that the Lyffans' appearance of indolence is deceptive. For these simple colonists have a unique gift for imbibing new technology and manipulating it to their own advantage. Maybe the mission isn't quite so hopeless after all....if the Terran agents can keep the Lyffans from killing each other, that is....

`Ten Years' is a competently written, if rather bland example of SF in the early 60s. It's more of a humorous take on the space opera formula than a genuine adventure novel per se. In many ways it demonstrates why the New Wave movement was destined to generate so much excitement, and even turmoil, in SF writing; by 1965 the genre was badly in need of new concepts and new approaches to its subject matter.